Critical Reflection!

 

When we came up with the idea of this documentary, we really wanted to stress the idea that arts have a major impact on society as whole. By representing young artists in the industries of film, music, and theater, we thought that would be the best way to stress that idea since many are not really accepted for those career choices. As someone who makes films and wants to be part of this industry in the future, I have never really received support from my family as they believed this wasn’t career choice for me and that I should choose careers like business, or law, or in the medical profession to live a “good life” but once I realized there are is a future in my career through the things I make and the things I do with it which made many people in my family realize I had a shot. For me personally, I wanted to show this documentary to other artists who may be struggling with the same issues and prove to them that they do make an impact in this society whether big or small, their art is worth keeping alive.  

When researching for this documentary, I knew that we wanted to develop a special style within our documentary. Something visually pleasing that would keep the audience engaged and keep them attached to our subjects as well as our overall plot. Within my research certain examples such as “American Promise” and “A Robus Heart” in the New York Times Op-Doc series really emphasized to me the importance of 1) being very authentic with the interviews and what I was asking but also to keep it beautiful and focused on them specifically.

Other documentaries such as “The Incongruent Congruent Outlook of Two Insecure Teenage Boys” helped me really think of the way I wanted my b-roll to look like and the coloring I wanted to use for the documentary. In addition, because of these documentaries I wanted to practice the use of indirect interviews to challenge myself but to also let the interviews tell their story for themselves, since I believed it would have a bigger impact on the audience compared to direct interviews. I also wanted to include the use of archived and filmed b-roll to bring both that sense of realness and present moment into the doc. 

For this documentary our main target audience was between the ages of 15-19 since we are focusing on the teenagers and young artist who are just now figuring out what they want to do in life for example, I didn’t realize I wanted to do film until I was around 13-14 so this documentary would’ve really motivated me to keep going when I first decided after a year of working on my craft. But I feel like this piece connects with our audience and engages with them because of the content we are creating and the message we developed. One critique that we received from a former classmate was “The documentary conventions used tied the piece together very nicely and made it seem like I was watching a professional documentary.” (Miguel Cabrera) and “From the beginning of the doc, Binder caught my eye. I was automatically intrigued by the music, the title, and the inspirational quote “Every Artist Was First an Amateur The quote worked very well with their purpose, which was to get into the lives of artists that’re parts of different art niches.” (Natalia Szabo) which can illustrate not just the level of high quality of our documentary considering we are high school students but also illustrate how indirect interviews, the use of music, the archived and filmed b-roll, and the questions we asked played a big part within the documentary making the audience feel really connected to what we wanted to say. However, there are things that could have been improved.

Some critiques we additionally got was “I would make sure your stylistic choices are consistent throughout the piece, each part felt and looked different than the other.” (Mya Wolf) as well as “While each of the parts was great, I think the focus for each one of them could have been a bit clearer. I mentioned this in the group, but Monica’s part was specifically about music and that is all she talked about, but Santiago’s part was about film, and he talked about making music so I would have taken those parts out, especially since the documentary ended up being about 12 minutes long.” (Samantha Duarte). During our discussion in class after submitting

the documentary I did agree with these critiques because one of the struggles we had during the editing process was figuring out how we wanted to transition everything so hearing from our peers helped us immensely as in the future we know that we can make those changes in order to have a better product. I also like the fact that I got to go over the documentary with Ms. Stocklosa, our advisor, to take it to the next level and make it as good as we can in order to be able to attend competitions as well as film festivals. Through our documentary we wanted to develop a sense of branding through different ways. First, our Production name “TAME Productions” as a team we wanted to be represented together as young filmmakers, so we believed the first best step to do this was to develop something that was just ours. But overall, I loved this production so much and what we did as a team was really great. Could things improve? Of course, nothing is perfect and there is always room for improvement but to Ava, Tai and I this was probably one of the most creative and high-quality things we have ever developed not just as a team but individually as well. I am so glad I got to work with this amazing team of filmmakers who have taught me so much and I can’t wait to see what TAME Productions will do in the near future.  

Doc Part Four

 Editing Stage

   

As I started to edit my b-roll within the doc I realized how important it was to color grade all of my shots in order to have the best quality for my documentary. After a couple of tries, I realized my coloring skills weren't the greatest since I had only practiced with past projects in my television production class as well as personal projects that I have made in the past. I kept trying with different settings in premier like the basic correction, creative, and curves within premier but I was never fully satisfied with the way my shots were looking with the color, so I turned to my bestie YouTube and found some great resources to use for color grading which thought me a lot about what I can in adobe with color as well as different tricks I can use within future videos. 

Music = Literally Everything.

I felt that music was really important for certain parts of my documentary in order to elevate it as much as possible, but I also wanted to add a special touch to my part and since my subject was a musician, I got the opportunity of using most of my b-roll clips and background music since I had my interviewee sign and play many instruments that helped bring it all together. I went on a huge search to find the perfect soon for the final sections of my part and after hours of looking I found a song that I believed matched really well with my part. 

I felt that this song really aligned with the emotions I wanted to portray within my part of the doc, and it overall fit the personality of my subject within the doc. I also thought it would be really fun to incorporate things she has recorded in the past, so she sent the song that she wrote with her sister in California. 

After a long period of editing, adding, and reediting certain parts of the doc it finally came together, all three parts merged together very nicely, and I feel like we did a really good job of accomplishing our goals. Final product: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1epE4x_3anSvMXsbXoCsEOqZ98IKC42Yc/view?usp=sharing 

Doc Part Three

 Filming and More Filming

    After the filming with Santiago and Monica, I had to sit down with Monica to get some archived footage in order to add it to my part of the doc so I could talk about her origin story and show she got into music with her sister. My friend Tai had to kind of do the same with Santiago to get footage of his films and past projects to incorporate within his part of the documentary. 

Keeping Contact!

   

Over Thanksgiving break, I had the privilege of visiting my home country, Venezuela, after not being able to return for 8 years. Due to the difficulties of internet connection and trying to see family and friends throughout the break, I didn't have the chance to participate in filming the last interview for the documentary, I felt bad that I wasn't able to make it and help out but there's not much I could do either in another country. However, I was able to start my editing process earlier that I had plan which really gave me the time to plan accordingly with drafts as well as pay attention to a lot of detail within my shots, my editing, and my sound to make my part of the doc as best to my ability as it could be before the due date. 

Editing!!

 Editing was probably the most interesting and fun part of the documentary as I got to see everything come together. Editing the interview, was definitely the hardest to accomplish as there are many ways, I could have structured the interview since it was pretty long. After finally coming to an agreement with the executive producer about the final structure, I started the process of implementing b-roll and color grading the doc as a whole.

Doc Part Two

 80% of Production is in Pre-Planning

 

Before I started to fully plan the pre-planning process, I began to look at other student docs before creating my own because I wanted to submit to competitions with this doc. I scrolled through some common schools in Broward and came across this documentary of one of my friends in West Broward called "The Incongruent Congruent Outlook of Two Insecure Teenage Boys", which really inspired me to learn a lot about color grading, as well as get really genuine shots in order to make the doc feel more organic. 

As we're starting to plan to create our own docs in class, me and my classmates Ava and Tai have started to look at different ideas for our own documentary. After a lot of discussing and brainstorming we came to terms to make a doc about how different forms of art can be intertwined as they all try to achieve the same purpose. We started to look for interviewees as well as different places to film our interviews. We decided to go for an indirect interview type of interview as we felt it would be more affective for our piece. After we built questions and settled everything for planning, we were ready to go to film our first 2 interviewees of the doc. We wanted to make sure everything was planned accordingly in order for the production process to go smoothly and there was not a lot of complications within the filming and editing process. 

Filming!!!!

We began the filming process right after finalizing the outline and planning our interview dates with our interviewees. Our first interview was Monica Torres, her section was mainly focused on her music aspect of her life. It was really fun experience to film with her and interview her as she is such a wonderful person to be around with and was overall as fun experience to shoot. The next day we also filmed our second interviewee with Santiago Salazar the creator and All-American High School Film Fest Tindie winner. It was such an honor to interview someone who I look up to so much as a filmmaker his style and his creativity is incredible, and I was so glad to learn so much from him out of just talking to him about this passion and actually being around him and how even though it was not his production he still cared enough to teach me new things and show me how to do certain things with the camera that I have never learned how to do. Overall, it was a great experience speaking with both of them as I felt very connected to the both of them and felt like our doc was already becoming something really great. 

Documentary Part One

 Start Button

    Lately in our AICE Media A Level course, we have started to learn about documentaries and their conventions. Since we are starting to develop our own documentaries in the class later on, we have started to learn what a documentaries purpose is and how to properly make a documentary. 

Learning Process

    In class we learned that there are several different types of documentaries ranging from historical to mockumentary but the one I was most interested in was biographical as for my own documentary I wanted to focus on a specific group of people. Some conventions we learned were the use of handheld camera which created a lot of realism within the documentary, it makes the audience feel as if they are in the moment with the subject which I thought was very important to the type of doc I wanted to develop. I also wanted to include a narrative type of format as well as some type of archived footage or cool b-roll shots to make the documentary visually pleasing but to do that I had to try and have selective editing within the documentary to make my audience understand my story better. 

    When learning about Direct and Indirect interviews I knew that I would rely heavily on indirect interviews as I believed it was the most effected way to create the documentary engaging and very real.  I also believe music would help convey the feeling I wanted in certain parts of the doc.

Watch Party!

    To continue our learning of documentaries, we watched several documentaries in class to understand the conventions of them better. One of the documentaries that really influenced what I wanted to create was American Promise (2014). 

    As this was the first documentary we watched in class, it impacted me the most as it made realize that something can be seen as very superficial at first but as they go on through life, they start to understand the major issues kids face in America at such a young age. While watching this documentary I understood the impact between direct and indirect interviews within a documentary because at the beginning of the doc, many direct interviews were used since the kids didn't really know how to formulate a proper answer as they would later in the film because they learned to gain a certain maturity that would affect the way their lives are demonstrated. 

    This documentary also illustrated how important the use of music can convey certain emotions but also how the use of silence can covey certain types of emotions depending on situation they are in. For example, when Shean left school, many kids were sad to see him go and the music under it conveyed the emotion of a bittersweet ending within the doc but when Sheans bothers passes away or when Idris starts to question if things were better if he were white, things get really quiet which can motivate certain types of emotions of anger or distress or sadness but it's really up to the viewer to feel the way they are interpreting the situation. 

Another Documentary we were assigned to watch in class were the Op- Docs of the New York Times, I watched several but one of the docs that was most interesting to me was "A Robus Heart" directed by Martin Benchimol. Within the doc even though it was just a couple shots, he had very affective, colorful, and beautiful b-roll shots which made it really important for me to get those types of shot within my doc. Another important element that I found really important for my doc was the questions that I'm asking and to make sure to make my interviewee comfortable enough to answer my questions the way I want them to be answered. Within the doc there was a lot of emotion from the interviews voice which made me want to give them a hug or cry for them which motivated me to make sure that during the process of my doc I asked the most important questions to get that raw beautiful emotion that would really connect with the audience. 

Another important element I learned from this doc is the way I wanted to frame my interviewee. I learned that since I have taken TV classes in the class, I wanted the traditional Left/Right third type of documentary where they have lead room to speak. Part of the reason why this documentary was entertaining but a little difficult to watch that that everything was in the middle, while it was beautifully shot it's not my preferable way of shooting interviews so for this I wanted to stick to the traditional type of framing within my doc.

Guess Who's Back??

 I'm Back :))

    I'm Back! And I'm so excited to continue my blogs this year as there is a lot I want to talk about and create as an artist but, so much has happened in the last six months so let me catch you up to speed. 

Summer: 

  So, as the year ended, I became a junior, very scary moments as I realize how much little time, I have left in high school but started to become excited towards my future and what's in store for me, I was sad to see some of my senior friends go but I know they are doing amazing where they are. Once the stressful months of testing had ended, summer finally arose but for me I was still working and working hard as I created my first short film! It wasn't the greatest since I did majority completely by myself, but it was a really cool experience working with my friends and filming and editing the project, and I enjoyed that so many people liked it as well. Middle of June I attended the Skills USA National Leadership Conference where my partner Andrew and I competed in Television Production. We placed 8th in the nation which was crazy for our first year going to the national level, but we can't wait to go back next year and do even better in the competition :) I also worked at a summer camp over the summer camp with kids from ages 5-12 where I made so many new friends and had really cool experiences.

Back to School:

Summer flew by but that just got me even more excited in my filmmaking journey as my crew and I flew all the way New York City where we competed at the All-American High School Film Festival, the biggest high school film festival in the world. Prior to the event, we had 10 weeks to plan a 6-minute short film that we would shoot and edit in a span of 2 and half days in New York City. After a lot of planning and working out the details we finalized our film and were headed to the Big Apple to have a week of a lifetime. We saw so many student films, meet new creators that had so much passion about filmmaking just like we did and overall had an amazing time. The process of making the film was rocky as we were trying to perfect as much as we could before submitting but once it was up, we were very proud of what we had made. And everything was so worth it when we found out we were part of the top 10 finalist out of everyone who competed! We didn't end up wining but becoming a finalist on our first year was one of the most amazing experiences ever and I can't wait to go back next year and submit more of my films to this amazing festival! 

Currently:

Now I'm back in school and still in the process of creating more and more films to build for my portfolio but most importantly to make art and to progress as the next generation of filmmakers. Can't wait to show you what's coming up :))))